RSSAMD Debuts Dual-Core Opteron, Athlon
By Nate Mook | Published April 21, 2005, 11:48 AM
As expected, AMD officially launched its dual-core Opteron processors for high-end servers Thursday at an event in New York City. The company is also preparing a dual-core desktop processor dubbed the AMD Athlon 64 X2, which will launch in June and go head to head with Intel's dual-core Pentium chips.
The 800 Series Opteron is available now and designed for four- to eight-way servers, while the 200 Series processors aimed at two-way servers and workstations will ship late May.
By packing two CPU cores onto a single chip die, AMD claims its new Opterons offer up to a 90 percent performance boost. The company says its dual-core chips use the same power and infrastructure as their single-core brethren, meaning a new chipset will not be required - only a BIOS upgrade.
Intel's dual-core chips, on the other hand, will require new motherboards with supporting chipset.
"Because our non-disruptive dual-core architecture is designed to fit in today’s existing infrastructure and provide leading- edge performance, enterprise customers can rapidly adopt AMD64 dual-core processors for servers and workstations today and for client platforms in June," said Marty Seyer, AMD corporate vice president, in Thursday's announcement.
With pressure from rival Intel, which launched its consumer-oriented dual-core Pentium Extreme Edition for desktop PCs earlier this week, AMD pushed forward its dual-core releases. Analysts and industry watchers hyped up the race, saying AMD could use the dual-core launch as an opportunity to win market share from Intel.
"We have flawlessly executed manufacturing AMD64 processors, which is why today we are announcing the world's only broad dual-core client and server processor line-up, well ahead of our announced schedule," said Seyer.
HP, IBM and Sun have already pledged to use the dual-core Opterons in their servers. Sun's Fire V40z integrates four processors and requires 40 percent less power than comparable Xeon multiprocessor offerings, the company says.
On the consumer side of the market, AMD is taking a slightly different approach from Intel, which is targeting power users and gamers.
AMD's Athlon 64 X2 will not replace its high-end Athlon 64 FX processor that is designed for gaming. Because most games are not written to take advantage of the new chips, AMD says X2 will primarily benefit digital media enthusiasts and PC users who run multiple applications simultaneously.
Becoming an early adopter of dual-core technology won't come cheap; pricing for the Athlon X2 will range from $537 to $1,001 in 1,000-unit quantities. The Opteron 200 Series starts at $851 and scales to $1,299, with the Opteron 800 Series topping out at $2,649 per processor.
The AMD Athlon 4400+ x2 has already shown itself to be the faster then anything Intel has right now which is amazing. { Anandtech.com }
Windows XP x64 running on Dual Core is so responsive even when the PC is busy doing other things like scanning for viruses or encoding.
The next 12 to 18 months is going to great.
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|Like dual processors that were the latest, greatest thing four years ago ...and are rarely mentioned anymore... dual core single processors have to have software written for it.
Sadly, won't benefit most of us.
The Computer Rodent
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|let me guess your xp start menu:sol, calc, hearts, paint, winmine?
normal power user will definitelly will benefit from dual core
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|When AMD and Intel ramp up production, prices will drop. The market will see a huge increase in the number of dual-core users and software vendors will update their appraches to writing MP code accordingly.
It'll take a bit for the SW market to catch up, but then again, it always does.
-Phoenix
"The conclusions drawn here may not be those of the the viewer, nor of the host. They may also not be mine, my myriad personalities, or those of any spirits channeled by myself previously, presently, or in the furutre. As a matter of fact, it may not even make sense. Not that I would know, I don't even remember what I said. Hello...Who are you?"
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|I would agree with you - that makes perfect sense - except for the fact that there is nowhere else for the rising demands of software to go.
The rate of increase for clock speed on CPUs has hit a plateau. Chip makers are no longer able to make the frequency very much faster without sacrificing a lot in other areas.
Dual-core is their alternative to increased clock speeds. They are finding other ways to make processors faster. The whole process started with more on-die memory, then smaller processes, and now this.
For that reason, I think dual-core, and even just dual-processors, will catch on this time. We won't have any other choice.
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|I've been running duallies at work for 6 or 7 years. It allows multitasking really well as long as you have XP , 2000 or NT. Win9x never supported duallies.
Dual CPU or dual core allows what I call "smooth computing". Everything runs smoother because you have two CPU's to spread the load.
Even if the application is not duall aware, XP will farm out applications and run them on seperate CPU's (cores) or run its own stuff on one and applications on the other.
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|Most software vendors will have to rewrite their code to use 64-bits. It would only make sense to make them multithreaded in the process. With Windows xp 64 and Windows 2003 64, the push is there to re-compile old apps.
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|for gamers it does nothing....
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|" for gamers it does nothing...."
Unless you run two screens or more. I run games with comms or tactical information open on a second screen - the fact these processes can now be run on a seperate processor is certainly advantage to me, as a gamer.
It's a shame more games don't let themselves run in a proper windowed mode where you can move the mouse past the end of the game screen without switching D3D off and on.
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|You will not see any difference.
Teamspeak/RogerWilco/Whatever are not that resource intensive...
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|Just pointing out...this is about dual-core, not 64-bit, but your comment still applies. This is kinda like HT--when the software supports it it will be better. The problem is you'd be surprised on how much new software that DOES NOT take advantage of hyperthreading. Why? Probably a pain in the a$$ to write the code for. Dual-core, however, is supported now on Intel and AMD so it is likely to have much more acceptance and much more support by software vendors. Think about it. Many games advertise AMD, and use 3dNow! before using SSE--the reason HT is not used in games because many game developers prefer AMD which does not have hyperthreading.
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